Making a Multi-Language Site

Knowledge Base

Responsive Website Builder

Make A Multi-Language Site

Duda Support > Responsive Website Builder > Advanced

Overview

You can translate your website into multiple languages to reach a larger audience. For each new language you add, we create a duplicate version of your site to host the translation. You can translate sites manually, or use the free Google Translate feature built-in to the editor.

Please note, content added to a specific language version of your site (text, images, etc) will not sync to the other language versions of your site. For this reason, we recommend adding multiple languages as a final step, once you have completed building your website.

Guide

Choose Default Language

The default language is the main language of your site’s content. All other languages will exist in sub-directories while the default language will use the main domain.

We will try to automatically identify the default language of your content, but you can manually set this by clicking the "change" link. Once you add multiple languages to your site, all new content needs to be translated from the default language version of your site. This is important to select correctly, because the default language cannot be changed after new languages are added to the site.

Add a New Language

Click the Add Language button.

Select one or more languages you'd like to add. Please note, some languages are available under multiple country flags (Spanish for example). Click Done when you are finished.

Disable or Delete Languages

You can disable a language by clicking the toggle, or delete a language version by clicking the X next to the toggle.

Disabling a language allows you to work on customizing the content/translation for that language, before making the language public and live on your site. If you want to publish the site and not include a language in it make sure to disable it first.

Deleting a language will remove it from the site all together, links to this language will redirect to the default language. A backup version will be added automatically to your backups list in the site settings.

Language Selector Design

The language selector is the way for users to switch between languages on your site. Click the Design tab to see options for the language selector. This language selector will appear on all language-versions of your site. These layouts will only affect desktop and tablet view, mobile devices can only include the small prefixed language drop down.

Automatic vs Manual Translation

By default, the multi-language feature will automatically translate your website content into the new language you are adding using Google Translate. While this service is provided for free, Google Translate does not always provide the most accurate translations. You should review and edit the content in the translated version of your site to fix any errors. However, if you'd prefer to manually translate your entire website, just un-check the automatic-translation box before adding any new languages.

What Content will not be translated?

The following features are currently not available in multi-language.

Personalization

eCommerce StoreFront products

Blog Posts

Page title and descriptions. See the SEO considerations section for more information

Positioning the Language Selector

After you click done, you are immediately prompted to choose a location for your language selector. Feel free to drag and drop the selector to your desired location. This step is skipped if you have a fixed header.

The language selector is added automatically to a new row on top of the site. Changing the position at this step will allow you to locate and design the language selector in your preferred location for all languages.

Once you click done the new languages will be added to the site and any change in the location and/or design of the selector will require you to do it in each language separately.

Editing Content in the New Language

You can select a different language version from the top toolbar, just click on the flag of your default language, then select the language you'd like to edit from the dropdown.

Any changes you make to the new language version to your site, like changing text, or adding new widgets, will not be reflected in the other versions of your site.

Adding Additional Pages & Popups

A new page can be added only from the default language. If you want to display a specific page in a specific language please add it to the default language and hide the page in the navigation menu. Adding a page to all languages will require you to add it to the default language and then to each individual language.

First, you must add the page in the default language.

Then, switch to a translated language version and open the Pages & Popups menu.

Click Translate Another Page and select the page from the dropdown. You must do this for each translated version of your site. This is one of the reasons we recommend translating your site only when your site is complete and you don't expect to be adding more content.

Considerations

While site content is automatically translated, fields important to SEO are not automatically translated including: